Tuesday, November 05, 2019

“Like a waterwheel ablaze, everything is of the hunt, voracious.” The poems in Take Out Delivery burst at the seams with food, with the devouring of food, with the insatiable consumption of pop culture. Paul Siegell dishes out pizza, fortune cookies, Campbell’s soup, pasta, eggplant, tapioca, cassava, and Philly soft pretzels––all in the first eight pages. Even the title turns our minds toward dinner: what to get? where? how? The poem titles, each beginning, “We’ve Come for Your...,” remind us that we don’t live at the top of the food chain.

This book is a hybrid, a cross-genre work with its home in the 21st century. Groups of poems alternate with clusters of cartoons featuring the hot pepper people. Ingeniously assembled by an off-label use of punctuation marks, these beings have the genetic characteristics of Siegell’s earlier punctuation cartoons, but here they strut with special flamboyance. While “tightening up their grooviest of shoelaces,” one queries, “chaos cicada?”; the other replies, “impulse octopus!”

Always generous, Siegell agreed to let me interview him. When asked, “Who is the ‘we’ of the poem titles?”, he replied, “The hot pepper people.” They turn out to have names: Hemingway, Gorbachev, Tug McGraw, Rachmaninoff, Catherine the Great, Leonardo diCaprio, Cleopatra, and many more. Throughout the poems we find the names of famous people, public figures who traded privacy for immortality and whose names have contributed to defining pop, and not-so-pop, culture. Siegell says, “I spent my childhood watching MTV,” a medium in which everything has its defining name and its distinctive brand.

Wordplay drives the activities of the hot pepper people. Siegell describes his creative process: “It’s really hard for me not to play.” His strongest imperative is to sign his work by making it uniquely his. If he can’t say definitively, “This is mine,” he isn’t satisfied. Once he realized that “proper nouns were going to take the weight of this book,” the visual element became essential and the cartoons found their place. Throw in one more character, Jay Uxtapo, who personifies creative juxtaposition, and we’re off, circling in a vortex from which we emerge dizzy but well fed.

The recurring theme of a scavenger hunt unifies most of the poems. Jay Uxtapo presents “Pterodactyl scavenger hunt,” “Stark raving mad scavenger hunt,” “Manna from heaven scavenger hunt,” and many more. Siegell points out a subtle detail: in a clever use of assonance, each scavenger hunt is associated with another short “a” sound, which underlines the phrase.

For all its hyperactive scavenger hunts, Take Out Delivery is no bag of popcorn. About a quarter of the way in, Siegell realized he needed a serious theme to give the book more heft. Pop culture has its grim side, notably the 9/11 attacks. A line at the bottom of the copyright page clues the reader in to what’s coming: “Lucky numbers ∙ 9, 11, 9, 11, 9, 1, 11.” The first cartoon appears on page 9, followed by the first poem on page 11. Divided by cartoons, the poems occur in alternating groups of nine and eleven. Between the last two groups, a lone poem, “We’ve Come for Your Pause Button,” begins, “’Fire and smoke engulf the towers of the World.’” There follows “One of the saddest scavenger hunts ever imagined.” The 9/11 section brings a radical shift of pattern, rhythm, and tone. Siegell slams on the brakes in this moment of honoring the dead. Two empty squares, facing each other and each alone on its page, could look like brake pedals but represent something far sadder: the footprints of the fallen Twin Towers.

Under the calliope music a funeral march plays. For any American, references to 9/11 bring up the precariousness of survival. We comfort and distract ourselves with too much work, too much noise, excessive consumption. The book’s “moment of silence,” as Siegell describes it, forces a sudden examination of our fears.
In “We’ve Come for Your Train Conductor Hole Puncher,” a poem preceding the 9/11 section, Siegell drops one more hint by multiplying 111,111,111 x 111,111,111. This calculation involves 18 ones, or (you guessed it) 9 elevens. The result is spectacular.

Wednesday, June 26, 2019

One of the three oldest surviving print publications in the country, The Philadelphia Inquirer was founded in June 1829 by John R. Walker and John Norvell. The latter man is the source of the paper’s moniker, which comes from this quote:

That motto informs a newly spicy tagline for the rebranded company. Answering the question of why “an Inquirer” seeks out information, it uses a phrase that’s relatively brash for the once-staid periodical: “Because they give a damn.”

The tone shift was entirely on purpose, per Parzych, who said it was intended to catch people’s attention and also “infuse some of the proud DNA” of the Daily News into the combined brand.

“Internally, it’s made people excited because, you know, we do give a damn. Philadelphia gives a damn, right?” she said. “We were really trying to encapsulate the passion that is Philadelphia.”

Monday, July 16, 2018

MAINTENANT 12: A JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY DADA WRITING AND ART (Three Rooms Press, 2018), features work that explores the theme “We Are All A ‘Like.'” With the rise in social media use—and abuse—the concept of “like” has reached whole new levels. There’s the idea of an individual’s reaction to events, people, images, etc. as a reduction to “Like” or “Dislike” without need for deeper consideration. Then there is the status factor: that something which is “Liked” by the largest number of people is of value. The concept, while simple, has innumerable ways of looking at it.

Cover by MacArthur Fellow artist Nicole Eisenman. Inside, the work of nearly 200 artists and writers from six continents storms the pages.

Monday, July 02, 2018

*** speakers up / click to play ***Well, Friday’s book release was pretty much the most unreal night I’ve had in a long time. Thank you all – so much – for making it truly extraordinary. It was a total love fest and I'm still basking! Everyone’s support has been beyond incredible.

Take Out Delivery plunges, playful, punful into the cheeky contem-poetics via poemics and plumbing the sonic underbelly of collective unconsciousness. "Lip locked to hip hop", "achingly rhythmic" scrawl about the base, the beat. Surreal submerge in subconscious cultural cream. Head-under-water bobbing for apples you know will taste juicy

as solitary sudden revelations of communal hear, now: "hot pepper people performing the sitar ritual over the relic of self." Bits of true dialogue glimmer like flashes seen out of eye corner. Culture hoarder. "Dark matter scavenger hunt." Dumpster diving for treasure, truth. The image shakes itself out of the eaves, startling, unfurling: "Most of those being found are dead--" These poems writhe and meaning writes itself in a slip-slide as images bleed blend and build into hot chili peppered wonders we never thought possible till your musical body wrung them out for us, in comic color.

Needless to proclaim, the SD team utterly adores your work and would love to publish Take Out Delivery!

Monday, March 21, 2016

Writing poetry can be a pretty difficult thing to do, but it can also be a lot of fun. So let’s do just that! And let’s get granular. Let’s go i-n-s-i-d-e the wonderful words we chose and use, and take a look at the letters that get us where we never knew we could go.

To some poets, music is a major part of their work – both in process and in content – because music is a major part of who they are. Come hang with a few local poets as they discuss how songs, instruments, beats, musicians, and genres of music impact the writing, reading, and performance of poetry. Paul Siegell (moderator) with Kirsten Kaschock, Camae Defstar, and Ernest Hilbert

Fantastic Ekphrastic: What is poetry's relationship to other art forms? An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a work of art, but the idea of ekphrasis need not stop there. What are some of the new ways in which Philly poets are combining poetry projects with visual art, dance, portraiture and other hybrid creations? What role can concrete poetry play? What are good starting points for writers wishing to tackle art as a subject area, and how can one best collaborate with contemporary peers as well as artists of ages past? Join these Philly poets to see how they infuse their poems and poetics through collaboration with art via multiple modes.

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Thanks to Zachary Cosby, 13 spreads from my manuscript, JACQUES LIPCHITZ, is the first post to appear on Fog Machine in 2016!

Created entirely in the lo-fi of Microsoft Word, JACQUES LIPCHITZ
is a book-length visual expression of creative history. Inside you’ll find typographical recreations of the artist’s sculptural biography, and where appropriate, some of my story as well. Inside you’ll find.

That these, these aren’t even the things I care about the most.
It’s 1 a.m. and I am deleting the death of a poet. Sky burial 5.
What else would I be doing if I just didn’t show up for work?
I can see Orion taking aim. St. Sebastian scavenger hunt. On
a walk around the monument today: caged in scaffolding: all
its points of departure: Eve balancing an apple upon her head
while William Tell quarrels Cupid: It is a study in Rayonism.
It is a study in the sting our cash registers supply by opening.